Baby trade

What price would you put on the smile of a child? How
much would you pay for the pitter-patter of little feet? What about the
singular sensation of a baby instinctively squeezing your finger or the
exquisite pleasure of a newborn nuzzling sleepily into your neck —
what are those warm fuzzies worth, exactly, in real cash dollars and cents?

Luckily, most folks never have to calculate the cost,
because they conceive children the fun, free way. But couples who
can’t, or anyone seeking to adopt a baby, will probably run into this
barbaric math problem: How much are you willing to pay for a child?

Further complicating that question is race. No matter
how fervently Americans vow that all men are created equal, the adoption
industry seems to suggest otherwise. Many well-established, respected,
licensed agencies openly charge significantly higher fees for white infants
than for children of any other race, making African-American babies available at a fraction of the fees charged for the adoption of white
babies.

Illinois’ largest infant-adoption agency, the
Cradle, charges $9,200 to handle the placement of an African-American
infant but $25,000 for the adoption of a white baby. Another prominent
Illinois agency, Sunny Ridge Family Center, based in Wheaton, charges
$7,250 for an African-American newborn and $19,750 for a white child.

American Adoptions, based in Overland Park, Kan.,
with licenses in five other states, has an online application form that
requires prospective parents to choose either an
“agency-assisted” adoption, for $12,000 to $19,000, or a
“traditional” adoption, for $20,000 to $35,000. The
“traditional” program is defined as “all
non-African-American healthy newborns and infants,” while the cheaper
program is for “African-American (or any race combined with
African-American heritage) healthy newborns and infants.”

The Web site of Heaven Sent Adoption Services, based
in Fulton, Mich., features Bible verses and pictures of Jesus along with a
catalog of birth mothers looking for adoptive families. The fees vary by
situation, but most of the African-American babies listed fall into the
$6,500 to $14,000 range, with white babies listed at $15,000 to $27,000.

Because agencies aren’t required to publish
their fee structures, it’s hard to know how many agencies factor race
into their fees. But anecdotal evidence shows that it’s common and
accepted practice.

Beth Hall, executive director of Pact, An Adoption
Alliance, an Oakland, Calif.-based organization known nationwide for
facilitating minority-infant placements, frequently gets calls from
agencies looking for families ready to adopt African-American newborns. She
estimates that only about 25 percent of these agencies have explicit
policies stating different prices for children of different races.

However, she says, even agencies that don’t
have such a blatant policy often have a casual tradition of discounting
fees for black babies. Overall, Hall estimates that as many as half of all
adoption agencies and attorneys base their fees on the race of the child.

One agency that has discontinued this system is
Dallas-based Buckner Adoption and Maternity Services. In 2000, executive
director Adela Jones approached Buckner’s board to suggest abolishing
race-based fees.

“It just bothered me and bothered me,”
she says. “It seemed to me that these children were considered
blue-light specials, and I just couldn’t stand that. I just thought
it was so denigrating.”

She convinced the board to make fees dependent on the
adoptive family’s income — a system that she says has proved
successful.

Still, she understands why other agencies think a
discount is necessary: “It’s just hard to find couples who will
accept African-American children,” she says.

Not only is there a shortage of African-American
couples applying to adopt (a problem Pact’s Beth Hall blames on the
adoption industry itself), but there’s also the fact that most white
couples prefer white babies.

Transracial adoption is still a new and controversial
idea. Even though white couples have been applying to adopt black children
of various ages since the 1970s, the National Association of Black Social
Workers lobbied against the practice. Finally, the number of black
youngsters languishing in the child-welfare system simply because their
white foster parents weren’t allowed to adopt them became so
embarrassing that Congress passed the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, known as
MEPA, declaring that race could no longer be used as a reason to deny or
delay placement of a child in a qualified home.

MEPA was signed into law in 1994. That’s right:
As recently as 10 years ago, race could determine which children a family
could adopt. In 1996, Congress passed a set of amendments called the
Interethnic Adoption Provisions, or IEPA, to state more clearly that
“discrimination is not to be tolerated” and to strengthen
MEPA’s compliance and enforcement procedures.

Before and after statistics demonstrate the
significance of these two Acts: Before MEPA, a 1987 National Health
Interview Survey, conducted by the federal government’s National
Center for Health Statistics, found that only 8 percent of adoptions were
transracial and just 1 percent involved the adoption of black children by
white moms. In 1998, after IEPA, about 15 percent of the 36,000 adoptions
accomplished by the foster-care system were transracial or transcultural,
according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The new laws also affected private adoption agencies,
and suddenly little brown babies found themselves competing against
blue-eyed blonds in the adoption market.

And oh what a creative marketplace it is. Adoption
laws and regulations vary wildly from state to state. For example, in most
states, facilitators (unlicensed matchmakers, typically doctors, priests,
neighbors, or friends) aren’t allowed to be paid for their services.
A few states, though, permit facilitators to charge thousands of dollars
per match, which has made facilitation a lucrative profession in these
states.

Some states allow adoptive families to underwrite
rent, utilities, and even clothing and “personal hygiene”
expenses for a pregnant woman in the hope that she will place her child
with them. Other states ban any payments to a birth mother except medical
costs — after the child has been placed.

Laws regulating how or even whether the birth father
is notified also vary from one state to another. Similarly, some states
allow birth mothers to sign away parental rights within hours of giving
birth; others require a woman to wait several days, thus increasing the
chances that she’ll change her mind.

To complicate the system further, an agency can move
a pregnant woman — temporarily — to a state with more favorable
laws. After the baby is born and the birth parents’ rights have been
terminated, paperwork resolving all the differences is exchanged between
the state where the child was born and the state where the child will live.

Fees are likewise loosely regulated. Even though most
agencies are technically nonprofit, many manage to provide handsome
salaries for staff. Deedee Anderson, an unpaid consultant to agencies
handling “hard-to-place” children, networks from her home in
Utah with all sorts of adoption professionals, some of whom drop their
charitable veneer.

“I’ve known directors of
‘nonprofit’ agencies living in million-dollar homes with three
Hummers in the garage. I know one lady on the East Coast who routinely
takes trips to Bermuda with her whole family on a week’s notice. Now
imagine how much that costs. It’s despicable,” Anderson says.

Most agencies explain their fees as the cost of
services — overhead, keeping the lights on, paying staff. But the
only real constraint on what they charge is what the market will bear.

Linda Mur, who worked at a nonprofit Pennsylvania
adoption agency for a year, says that adoptive families were shown tables
itemizing all fees, but that the tolls were necessarily related to costs.

“It was broken out in a way that made it look
fee-based, but it was way more arbitrary than they made it sound,”
she says.

Industrywide, fees seem to shift with the value of
the federal adoption-tax credit. This credit, designed to encourage
families to adopt, basically works like a coupon adoptive families can
apply toward payment of their federal income tax. In 2001, when the
adoption-tax credit jumped from $5,000 to $10,000, agency fees increased
accordingly.

Compare this credit to the fees charged for minority
babies — $9,200 at the Cradle, $7,500 at Sunny Ridge. Thanks to the
tax credit, these little brown bundles of joy come with full rebates.

Not all agencies have color-coded fees. Some
wouldn’t even dream of it.

Jeanne Malone, adoption coordinator for the
Springfield diocese of Catholic Charities, finds it difficult to believe
that such a system exists.

“Are you saying they charge different fees
based on race? That’s just wrong!” Malone exclaims. “A
healthy baby is a healthy baby, and there’s no difference. I have so
many people who would just get down and mud-wrestle for any baby from
anywhere. That is just insane!”

Illinois Lutheran Child and Family Services adopted a
flat $9,500 rate years ago, says La Nell Hill, statewide director of
adoptions. “Back in the 1980s, there may have been a different fee
schedule for African-Americans — I’m pretty sure that’s
the case. But after IEPA went into effect, we decided it probably
wasn’t legal to do that,” Hill says.

The change came as a relief to Hill, who says she
never was comfortable charging fees based on race.

“My personal opinion — not policy from
the agency but just me — is that it just doesn’t feel right to
charge one fee for a baby with a particular racial background and another
fee for another baby with a different racial background,” Hill says.

Shelia Davis, founder of Heaven Sent Adoption
Services, freely admits that the adoption industry bases fees on race and
says that couples looking to adopt have learned to expect a discounted rate
for a black baby. Her agency charges a flat $6,000 administrative fee for
each adoption. But another part of her business involves
“networking” for 26 different agencies and attorneys to help
find homes for hard-to-place babies — that is, medically fragile or
minority infants. Davis’ fee for placing these babies is a flat
$1,000 per match, but that’s on top of the fee charged by the
original agency or attorney, and those fees are based on race.

As a veteran of the adoption industry, Davis
justifies this system by saying it’s the only way to find homes for
minority children. As the adoptive mom of two white girls and one black
boy, though, Davis chokes up as she talks about how “society”
has “devalued people based on pigmentation.”

Some agencies effectively skirt the issue by
“specializing” in minority infants. But even these agencies
sometimes charge more for biracial infants than for babies with two
African-American birth parents (the Pennsylvania agency where Mur worked is
one example).

Again, there’s no way to determine what
percentage of agencies use this stratified fee structure, but it’s
common enough that when Margaret Fleming of Chicago launched Adoption-Link
Inc., an agency specifically to serve African-American birth mothers, she
posted this promise on the agency Web site: “Adoption-Link makes no
differentiation in fee among full African-American, biracial, or
multiracial children.”

Adoption-Link charges a flat fee — “under
$10,000,” Fleming says. It was a decision that Fleming —
adoptive mom of seven children, four of whom are black — didn’t
have to ponder for a second.

“The worst thing that can happen to a kid is to
have a price put on his head. That’s like slavery,” she says.

On November, more than 40 adoption professionals
from agencies all around Texas gathered in Dallas for a half-day conference
on ethics. Split into groups of 10, they were assigned dilemmas to discuss,
and one group was given this question: “Is it ethical to charge a
lesser fee for an adoptive couple who are open to an African-American or
biracial child?”

Adela Jones, who had persuaded Buckner Adoption to
stop that practice, discovered that her agency was the only one in the room
that didn’t differentiate on the basis of race. But all of the others
had noble reasons to explain why they did.

“Their argument is that all families’
adoption fees contribute to the agency’s goal of placing children of
all colors in a speedy manner,” Jones says. “So in other words,
families adopting Caucasian children are subsidizing families adopting
African-Americans, and that’s OK, because it’s a form of
affirmative action.”

Jennifer Montgomery, director of special projects at
the Cradle — an 82-year-old Chicago institution whose list of famous
adoptive parents includes Bob Hope, Donna Reed, Al Jolson, and Pearl Buck
— says that her agency gets a state subsidy under the “black
infant adoption contract” that makes up some of the nearly $16,000
difference in fees between African-American and white babies.

But even at agencies that don’t get subsidies,
the use of color coding is sometimes viewed uncomfortably as a necessary
evil — necessary to attract families willing to adopt
African-American babies.

Becky MacDougall, director of domestic adoption and
birth-parent services at the Chicago-area agency Sunny Ridge Family Center,
says she wishes she knew of a better way to promote adoption of black
babies.

“We don’t like that there’s
different fees. It’s just a practicality of getting families,”
she says. “There’s criticism both ways, even among staff.
It’s one of those problems that you wish didn’t exist, but it
exists because of our cultural issues.”

She stresses that Sunny Ridge’s fees are for
services — “It has nothing to do with the value of the
child!” — and notes that the higher fee for white infants
includes as much as $8,000 in medical expenses, while the lower
African-American fee includes no medical expenses because many of these
birth mothers are on Medicaid.

And she takes the issue personally. Her husband also
works at Sunny Ridge, and one day a few years ago, he heard talk around the
office about a birth mom who was requesting a Christian family willing to
maintain an open adoption. This birth mother happened to be carrying a
biracial infant, but MacDougall says her husband felt “something just
gripped his heart.”

Three weeks later, they had a new son. MacDougall
says that her family could not have made that spur-of-the-moment decision
if the fee for that baby had been the white price.

There’s a popular perception that the hottest
commodity in adoption is the “healthy white infant.”
That’s may be true, but running a close second is the willing and
qualified black couple.

Most domestic adoptions now involve some degree of
“openness,” ranging from an exchange of photos and letters to
an ongoing, fully identified relationship. At a minimum, though, adoption
agencies allow a birth mother to select a family for her child by
giving her an assortment of profiles compiled by prospective parents.

Not surprisingly, many African-American birth mothers
leaf through these scrapbooks hoping to find faces that are a familiar
shade of brown. But nationwide, adoption agencies have trouble attracting
black applicants.

Robin Sewell, a California anthropologist who
describes herself and her husband as “painfully overeducated,”
drops her voice in embarrassment when she describes what happened when she
and her African-American husband began the adoption process. They had just
registered with Pact, and a social worker had begun the extensive
personal-background analysis known as a “home study” that every
adoptive parent must have approved.

“Even before our home study was done, we had a
number of calls. It was clear that we were, well, in demand,” she whispers,
“and it broke our hearts, because we couldn’t take every
kid.”

They eventually adopted a black baby girl from
Illinois. And even though they could “pass” as a biologically
related family, Sewell often finds herself announcing that her daughter is
adopted as a way of encouraging other African-Americans to consider
adoption.

“I try to talk to as many folks as possible and
let them know that there’s a need for black families,” she
says.

Agencies are trying all sorts of methods to recruit
black families. Sunny Ridge hired an African-American social worker and
sent her out to make presentations at minority churches and businesses. At
the Cradle, NFL Hall of Famer Gale Sayers and his wife, Ardythe, lent their
names to the African-American adoption program, earning the agency a nice
feature story in Ebony magazine. Jennifer Montgomery says that the Cradle is also
working with Chicagoland megachurches to recruit more minority families.

“The adoption community has done an abysmal job
of recruiting black families,” she says. “They bemoan that
those families aren’t out there, but they are. We just need to do a
better job of recruiting.”

African-Americans already adopt at twice the rate at
which whites do — 4 percent instead of 2 percent, Hall says. At Pact
— a facilitation organization focused exclusively on minority babies,
with fees based solely on income — two of every three babies are
placed with adoptive parents of their own race.

For now, though, most minority babies placed through
private adoptions will end up with white parents — some of whom opted
for a black or biracial child simply because of the lower fee and the
shorter waiting period. It’s up to agencies to try to educate these
adoptive parents about the unique challenges that come with raising a kid
of a different color.

Pact puts potential parents through a rigorous
screening that includes a written self-assessment and an in-depth
interview. Sunny Ridge uses Pact literature and requires prospective
parents to attend a series of three meetings with a panel of adoptees
reared in transracial homes. The Cradle requires prospective parents to
take several courses, including one called Conspicuous Families (available
online at adoptionlearningpartners.org).

“Just going to Kwanzaa fest doesn’t do
it,” says Sunny Ridge’s Becky MacDougall, adoptive mom to a
biracial son. “You have to become a multiracial family. You have to
bring people of color into your life.”

Ken Hutcherson isn’t so worried about color
coordination. As a black man married to “the whitest woman on the
face of the earth — a blond, blue-eyed fraulein” — he likes to joke that he’s the father
of “four German-chocolate children.”

He is, however, outraged by the price tags pinned to
babies by adoption agencies. Five years ago, Hutcherson launched a series
of billboards in metropolitan Seattle using photos of babies — black,
brown, and white — asking this question: “Why Aren’t All
Adoptions Created Equal?” Above each baby was a dollar amount: $4,000
for the black infant, $10,000 for the brown one, and $35,000 for the
classic Gerber model.

“These billboards caused so much unrest. And
you know who the most angry people were? Adoptive parents,”
Hutcherson says, “especially adoptive mothers. They said I was making
it look like they paid different prices for their kids. I said,
‘Well, you did!’”

A former linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks,
Hutcherson is now the pastor of Antioch Bible Church, where the
congregation is racially diverse and 4,000 members strong. He and his
church have been working to reform adoption for 15 years. The billboards
are just the flashiest part of his campaign.

For the past 10 years, his church has hosted an
“adoption ministry” that provides adoptions for free. Home
studies and other legal work are provided at no cost to the adoptive
family. So far, the program has produced about 100 adoptions. Hutcherson
also commissioned lawyers to draft Senate Bill 6457 outlawing race-based
fees. It’s pending before the Washington state Legislature now, and
Hutcherson dreams of taking similar legislation to the U.S. Congress.

He is also lobbying for the establishment of an
adoption-oversight office in each state. In Washington, he’s been
told, “Not now — we’re trying to cut the budget.”
So during a meeting with a group of legislators, Hutcherson offered to
staff an oversight office for free.

“I said, ‘You don’t have to pay me
— just give me the teeth to fire people that’s breaking the
law, and I’ll do it for free,’” he says. The legislators
responded by closing the meeting.

“They don’t know what to do with an
African-American complaining that white [adoptive parents] are being
discriminated against. Whites have been in control for so long, they can be
discriminated against and think it’s a privilege,” he says.

Hutcherson is not the only success story. At
Buckner in Dallas, Adela Jones found that removing the discount for black
babies did not have the predicted consequence of discouraging black
families from applying. In fact, Jones says, of five African-American
babies placed in the past 18 months, four went to black families who paid
the full fee. The fifth went to a family whose household income was low
enough to qualify for a discount — a preacher and a stay-at-home mom
— and that family happened to be white.

But aside from her ethics conference and
Hutcherson’s billboards, this topic isn’t getting much
discussion.

“I think on some level there’s
embarrassment,” Jones says. “There’s a school of thought
that says money should never be part of placing children.”